Glowing creatures

absolutely marvellous firefly display … All agree that it was unprecedented, even for Wilbraham. Level fields & woodland aisles were alive with dancing lights, till all the night seemed one restless constellation of nervous witch-fire. They leaped in the meadows, & under the spectral old oaks at the bend of the road. They danced tumultuously in the swampy hollow, & held witches’ sabbaths beneath the gnarled, ancient trees of the orchard”. [Lovecraft went to bed afterwards, intending to dream the fireflies into…] “spectral torches, & about the lean brown marsh-things (invisible to mortal eyes) who wave & brandish them in the gloaming when the unseen nether world awakes.” — letter to his aunt Lillian, 1st July 1928, kindly supplied in transcript by David Shultz.